« This working paper explores the consequences for historians’ research practice of the twinned transnational and digital turns. The accelerating digitization of historians’ sources (scholarly, periodical, and archival) and the radical shift in the granularity of access to information within them has radically changes historians’ research practice. Yet this has incited remarkably little reflection regarding the consequences for individual projects or collective knowledge generation. What are the implications for international research in particular? This essay heralds the new kinds of historical knowledge-generation made possible by web access to digitized, text-searchable sources. It also attempts an accounting of all that we formerly, unwittingly, gained from the frictions inherent to international research in an analog world. What are the intellectual and political consequences of that which has been lost? »

Quality management is an essential part in creating a trustworthy digital archive. The German network of expertise in Digital long-term preservation (nestor), in cooperation with the German Institute for Standards (DIN), has undertaken a small study to analyse systematically the relevance and usage of quality management standards for long-term preservation and to filter out the specific standardisation need for digital archives.

This paper summarises the results of the study. It gives an overview on the differences in understanding the task “quality management” within different organisations and how they carry out appropriate measures, such as documentation, transparency, adequacy, and measureability in order to demonstrate the trustworthiness of their digital archive.